I want to talk about life, love,
sharing and the world. I want to talk about sharing information about the
world. The world is never exactly what we say it is. History and
reality are two different things. It's like saying "Save the
planet." True, we should, but it's really us we're talking about saving.
The planet will just do its thing, it's ourselves that
need radical re-evaluation.
This is what
I'm talking about, fiction and friction. Fortune cookies are what I'm
talking about. Unfortunate cookies. Flammable/inflammable.
Ravel/unravel. Civil/Savage. We make up words to comprehend
but the ideas end up meaning the inverse. Relax the tension with more
tension. Foment, forget, fugue, what it do, torch the torturer.
I want to discuss colonization, militarization and jazz. I want to talk
without a colonizing discourse, in order to decolonize what seems to me so
inept, so insincere, immunized, and imperial-- travel blogging. I don't
want to start there but I think it's necessary to write openly from the gut
from the heart.
OK, so we dive in, divulge like we're out on my porch together and it's a hot
night. It's a season-long linger, bearing the character of what was but
betraying something else. Think of this as a possibility not a reality.
Blowing off steam, digging through trash, talking between drinks and
drags over a campfire, maybe the seeds will grow. Worth a shot. Maybe.
Come closer.
The world, in general terms, is a horrific and destitute place to live.
But it's home. Home is where the funk is. It would be
stupid of me to go on and on about how the world is poor and gross, but it
would be more wrong to just photo blog like it's all-peachy-look-at-me-in-Fiji.
I will try to do neither and more. Somewhere on this blog it might
make sense, but the more I see the less it makes sense.
I'm okay with things not making sense as long as the things are beautiful and don't
hurt anyone. Actually I am really into that type of thing if
you can't already tell. Poetry haunts me late in the afternoon. I
write how I like to read. I hope you're still reading. I love
writing and reading because it's like the opposite medium of a movie.
Make your own image, the contact is one to one ratio instead of one to
masses. Masses are interesting, more on mobs later.
If there is any comfort in getting to the halfway mark of your 20's it's that
realizing comfort is scant, at best. Or at least comfort starts to feel
imbalanced- you have too much or too little, no stasis. Love it where you
have it, because being comfortable is a privilege for too many and a condition
for so few. It's appropriate to reconsider comfort in a world where
crisis is the new norm.
I'm a compulsive, impulsive writer. It's a sad fact that a great deal has
been written about the Eastern world but very little has been said.
Academic experts are completely stuck, complicit, or enthusiastic in
supporting imperialism.
Under this light, the possibility of
failure is 100%, impossibility is my outset. A straight able-bodied white
man is writing about honesty and social justice. I promise to try, but my
aim is not to float on my own guilt to better places just for me. There
is a lot of actual real life work to be done in redressing past injustice and I
have only general ideas where to begin. My impulse is to change the world
for the better without immobilizing self-reflection.
For me, my
relative security and white-male-class privilege enabled me to wallow too deep
into self-loathing comfort back in the USA. I was not happy and did not
know what to do so I moved to another country to be a teacher. Sound
familiar? Actually there was a complexity of factors and processes at
play, but basically this is the honest truth.
When I
reread this post I do feel a bit of cognitive dissonance. But in all
honesty, honesty is like my shit. Stay true.
All this
shit is what I'm trying to pin down. I know the pins are on some A
Beautiful Mind shit right
now. I'm hoping, dear reader, that you will forgive my lack of citations
and concrete examples of douchebagery. You don't have to just trust my
depiction here. I'm hoping if you've read this far you do have a general
sense and acute anxiety that Western twenty-somethings abroad act like there
are no rules and further denigrate the already (justifiably) tarnished
reputation of folks like just you.
It's the
reality, Americans and to a lesser degree Europeans, tend to behave like
fucking pricks when they leave their homes. I don't mean to generalize,
but I am generalizing- only regarding those who already are fucking pricks.
I am offering this blog as apology and explanation and counterpoint to
all the drunk assholes. Get drunk, but don't be an asshole. Learn
or attempt to learn the language of the people you live among, no excuses.
The guise of
academia, the aegis of American Hegemony has grown big and strong. Full
grown. Eurodata. Eurotrash. The academic and the popular
fields of knowledge need to broaden, all of them. Let's start from
ignorance and move to curiosity, from intrigued to engaged, from connected to
concerned. The other is the same with a damaged history.
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